Friday, April 4, 2014

Update on the Gooberticker...

So I was just released from the hospital cardiac unit.

The docs know what happened to me - a thing called atrial fibrillation, coupled with extreme tachycardia.

That's a fancy way to say that the top two chambers of my heart were firing waaaaaay out of sequence with the rest of my heart, which means that my heart wasn't pumping blood the way it was supposed to, and the waaaaay out of sequence was partially, at least, my heart racing to near 300 beats per minute.

I was spiking from very, very high blood pressure to very, very low blood pressure (I passed out at one point in time, and went down to the floor).

The treatment includes beta blockers and some drugs that help the heart figure out how to have a proper rhythm again, and also some blood thinners, since poor circulation leads to clots, and having your heart out of whack is a very good way to throw clots like a boss.

Didn't stroke out.  Lucky me.

What the docs DON'T know is what caused it.  It does run in my family, but they eliminated thyroid and structural defects, so the only thing left is genetics, or my underlying autoimmune condition causing inflammation to my heart, causing the nodes to get cross-wired.

This is sort of scary to me.  I'm too young to have a bum ticker.

The drugs managed to get my heart back into a sinus rhythm at 4 o'clock this morning, and I was released at about noon, after 30 plus hours of arrhythmia and 26 hours in the hospital.

This was probably the scariest day of my life to date.  More to follow as I work my way through all of this.

I know it's got to seem like I've somehow managed to piss off the Gods at this point, but this is all the very surreal truth.

2 comments:

  1. Glad they found a control measure for you. Best of luck to you.

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  2. Holy Shit, dude. Get better. I hate illnesses, or ailments of that nature because there's not a damn thing to fight. To quote a Terry Pratchett bit, "no arse to kick, no soul to damn." All there is, is the diagnosis and the wait. Glad they have your diagnosis at least partly home and dry, here's to the recovery.

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